


A Prelude in Four Acts

by Telaryn



Category: Leverage
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, First Meetings, Gen, Heist, Meet the Family, Meet-Cute, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-27 19:14:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13254861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Telaryn/pseuds/Telaryn
Summary: Prompt #3. Pre-series, the first time Nate meets the othersHitter, hacker, grifter, thief - before they allowed him to bind them into the greatest team of vigilante do-gooders the world had ever seen, Nathan Ford chased each member of his team from his place on the legal side of the social line.





	A Prelude in Four Acts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Vicky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vicky/gifts).



> Got to say, Vicky, I had a ton of fun writing this one. Thank you again for playing with us, and I hope you enjoy your story.

“Ten years ago, I saw you the first time. You were swiping a Degas from a collection in Prague. I saw you. You saw me…”

He’d turned his back on the Church a seeming lifetime ago, but every so often Nathan Ford found himself wondering if God had bothered being decent enough to return the favor. Dumb luck had put him in Prague on that particular night, checking the security on a collection of late 19th century Russian jewelry. The Andropov collection was usually monitored by one of Nate’s co-workers, but Casey had a new baby, and a wife that wasn’t handling post-partum well at all.

“I owe you,” Casey had told him when Nate had agreed to make the trip in his place. Nate had made all the appropriate noises, but in the privacy of his own head he’d already made peace with the idea that any payback would be years away – if it ever happened at all. Babies changed you, changed your view of the world and the people in it.

He was more than single enough to appreciate that.

Motion detectors, pressure plates, alarm wires…everything was where it was supposed to be. “How do we look up there?” he asked, speaking into the two-way radio they’d given him in order to maintain contact with the museum’s security station.

“Green across the board,” came the response. The shift supervisor was one of the few on staff fluent in English – she’d agreed to work overtime in order to help Nate make sure the jewels were as safe as the local technology could make them.

A chill shivered down his spine, stopping Nate briefly in his tracks. _Something’s not right._ “Mischa, can you do me a favor and run the cameras?”

“In the gallery?” his Czech counterpart asked.

…brush of leather against stone, so soft he hadn’t even registered it on a conscious level at first. “Hit the adjacent galleries too,” he said finally. “It’s probably nothing, but…”

“Running now,” the guard intoned. Nate mentally followed the sequence of activities, keeping half an ear out for any more suspicious noises. Six cameras in, he heard Mischa curse.

“Which direction?”

“The impressionist wing,” Mischa told him. “Due east of your position. Nate, the camera’s down. Wait until I can send some more men to you – I have no idea what you’re walking into.”

 _The hand of God in his life…_ His higher brain knew Mischa was right. Charging in blind, without any kind of weapon or back-up, was one of the dumber things he’d done recently. Instinct drove him onward though – pivoting towards the hall he knew Mischa had been referring to.

IYS had an art expert on retainer Nate worked with occasionally. Maggie had been trying to cultivate a genuine interest in him for the art he was tasked with keeping safe – trying to get him to appreciate more than just the dollar value of the pieces. It was slow going, not helped by his bone-deep need to keep anything beautiful or positive from getting too far under his skin, but his logical mind had an appreciation for the detail involved in impressionist masterpieces.

The museum had a few lesser known paintings by Edward Degas – including one entitled Absinthe. It had caught Nate’s attention during one of his early walk throughs of the facility and he’d been intending to ask Maggie about it.

He was not expecting to see it already off the wall as he ran into view – a dark-clad shape expertly setting it into a transport case. “Stop!”

Years later, he would jokingly accuse that same woman of arranging to have the moonlight strike her at the perfect angle as her head came up – reacting in surprise to his sudden appearance. Whether on purpose or by accident, the effect was stunning. Tendrils of black hair escaped from a watch cap, framing a pair of wide, dark eyes in the loveliest face he’d ever seen.

Nate was never able to decide how long he and Sophie Devereaux stared at each other before the snap of her case closing brought him back to the present and what was really going on.

She ran.

He chased.  
***************************************  
 _”You better get that gun out of my face..._

“You keep this up Nate, and this fucker’s going to kill you.”

Head throbbing, Nate was finding it difficult to argue with his partner. It was the third – possibly the fourth – time he’d woken up from an expertly applied sleeper hold. Rambo (the moniker had been Sterling’s idea, and Nate hadn’t been able to come up with anything catchier) had started favoring them every time Nate had found himself between thief and target.

“Eighty thousand in pay-outs in the last three months, Jim,” Nate reminded him with a groan as Sterling helped him to his feet. “I don’t keep this up and both of us are going to be looking for a new job.”

As the two of them headed back to the museum’s security office, Nate consoled himself with the fact that they were at least getting better at predicting Rambo’s targets. The pattern had been a hard one to pin down – everything from a diamond and ruby necklace to a collection of Peanuts memorabilia featuring a vintage 1968 Snoopy lunchbox in mint condition. The few losses they’d managed to trace had ended up in the hands of people on both sides of the legal line.

“it’s more of a retrieval thing than outright theft,” he said out loud. “A thief is easier to track – they see something shiny and they go for it. Sometimes they sell it, like a Parker or a Peter Enright. Sometimes they don’t – like Sophie Devereaux or Jenny Agutter.”

“Every job we can connect him to, he’s been hired by somebody else,” Sterling added, nodding. “So how do we make this burst of genius insight work in our favor?”

Nate grinned in spite of his headache. “We leverage somebody into fronting for us, of course.”

It took them a few weeks and a lot of groveling to the home office to set up the sting, but eventually Nate found himself in a darkened penthouse apartment, watching over a collection of comic books worth just shy of a hundred thousand dollars.

He’d brought his gun. It wasn’t until years later and several pear-shaped encounters with the man he would come to know as Eliot Spencer, that he would realize what a bad idea it had been.

He drew the weapon that night, as soon as he saw the shadowy figure enter the room and head for the first display case. “Don’t move.”

Hands came back up automatically, but the gesture could hardly be called one of surrender. “You don’t want to do this.” Nate gestured, and Eliot obligingly stepped back two paces.

The man’s features were difficult to make out clearly in the shadowy light, but Nate could already tell there was more at work here than could be summed up by Sterling’s ‘Rambo’ moniker. “Okay, now what?” Eliot asked – and later when he would replay the encounter in his head, Nate would swear he sounded _disappointed_. “You don’t have any back-up, and you can’t imagine I’m going to just stand here and let you cuff me.”

“I have back-up,” Nate began, but his voice trailed off as he saw the small smile hovering at the corners of Eliot’s mouth. _Shit._

“I like you, Ford,” Eliot said. “You’re a better opponent than I’ve faced in a long time.” He nodded at the gun. “You made a mistake tonight, but under the circumstances I’m willing to forgive and forget.”

His grin widened. “Call it a wedding present.”  
**************************************************  
 _”I have a twenty-four year old genius with a smart phone and a problem with authority. You never stood a chance.”_

“Nate, he’s a kid!” Maggie’s shock matched Nate’s own when they’d finally put an identity to the most notorious cyber-thief IYS had ever seen.

“Nineteen,” Nate agreed, flipping through the file Research had assembled on Alec Hardison. “ _Just_ nineteen. And if he’d stuck to skimming Fortune 500 accounts we might never have caught him.” _Recruited by the CIA four times in the last three years – this kid is dangerous._

He glanced up, trying to match the cold statistics with the lanky, slightly hyper-active teenager on the other side of the one-way glass. “That,” he said, as much for his own benefit as Maggie’s, “is the person responsible for at least a hundred thousand dollars in fraud that we can tie him to from the Mirrorlake Resort, and as much as ten million in other rumored losses in the last couple of years.”

He watched Alec Hardison reach one end of the interview room, tap out a rhythm on the wall, then pivot and walk to the opposite wall. “I don’t see it.”

“You and me both,” Maggie agreed.

James Sterling hurried into the space. “Finished your Jedi mind crap yet? Ian wants us to find out how this guy pulled it off before word gets out.”

Nate wasn’t nearly as computer literate as he would like to have been, but he knew enough about hackers to suspect Ian was whistling into the wind on that score. Kids like Hardison loved to brag about their exploits even more than they enjoyed doing them. Anyone interested in how Hardison had defrauded a luxury resort, and could understand his explanation, already knew.

“You go first,” he told his partner finally. “I don’t think we’re going to get anything by overwhelming this guy yet.”

He had a sound, logical reason at the time for hanging back and observing how the young hacker interacted with authority figures. He figured after giving Sterling a chance to soften Hardison up, he would insert himself into the interrogation as the more in touch, quintessentially “good cop”.

Two years later over a late night round of drinks with that same hacker and one of the hardest men he’d ever tracked, he would ask Hardison how he managed to collapse James Sterling’s entire financial identity with no visible connection to any form of technology whatsoever…and he would learn that while hackers would nearly always brag about their exploits to each other, nothing beat a knowing smile when being questioned by an outsider.  
***********************************   
_Lost a bet. Son of a bitch._ The first glimpse they’d ever gotten of the thief known only as Parker, and he was stuck running observation in the museum’s security control room. “Left, Jim, left – she’s headed into the surrealist wing!”

The rhythm of Sterling’s labored breathing was scraping the edges of Nate’s calm. His friend had been drinking more – rumors of a long-term relationship gone bad – and when he’d proposed a bet to determine which of them would stay in the security booth on this assignment, Nate had very nearly just given into him.

Of course, that was before they realized _who_ had targeted their client’s Picasso.

She was taller than Nate had expected, and slender. As he tracked her from camera to camera, Nate mentally sketched in a climbing rig strapped in around the girl’s hips – black on black, and hard to distinguish in the low light. _That explains how she got in._ A black hood concealed her hair and face, but Nate knew from her IYS file that the girl was blond, and in her late twenties.

“Nate! Nate, I’ve lost her!”

Startled, Nate realized he’d lost at least a second to his mental gymnastics, and in that time Parker had vanished from the bank of monitors in front of him. “Son of a… Hold on, let me run the cameras.”

He was halfway through the sequence of cameras covering all the important points in the museum, when Nate felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. “I like playing with you better.”

He’d thought for half a second about going for the gun in his waistband, trying to draw down on the thief, but her choice of words and the tone of her speaking voice brought him up short. “Sometimes you have to take turns,” he said, moving his hands away from his body and starting to pivot.

Parker flinched back as their eyes met. Her hood was still in place, but he could see blue eyes framed by pale skin. A black carrying case was in her right hand; Nate felt his pulse leap at having the painting literally within his grasp. “So if we’re playing a game,” he offered, taking a cautious step forward, “what could I say or do to persuade you to hand over that painting?”

Her body language was difficult to read under the all-concealing black, but Nate would have sworn she had forgotten for a moment why they were there. “You don’t even have to hand it to me,” Nate continued, taking another careful step. “Just put it down and back away and we’ll all forget this ever happened.” Which was a stupid thing to promise, but he was walking a verbal high wire without a net at this point. Getting his hands on Parker was running a distant second right now to not having to deal with losing a five million dollar painting.

“You don’t have enough money to pay me for it,” Parker said abruptly, and Nate felt a chill shiver down his spine. There was something about the way she said it that left him feeling like she wasn’t guessing. “I like you, but I like money more.”

His brain grabbed for the information, filed it away for the future, and then returned to the task in front of him. “Are you sure there’s nothing I can offer you to walk away?” he asked. His heart skipped a beat as he saw movement in the shadows and realized that Sterling had finally shown up on scene. “Name it.” Praying that he hadn’t overplayed his hand, Nate took a final step forward and signaled his partner that he was ready.

Days later, when the bruise she left him with ran halfway down his face, Nate was still swearing there was no way somebody that size could kick that hard.


End file.
